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Sunday, April 24, 2005

And it turns out I enjoy the weekend a lot more when I do things I don't normally do. At the same time, doing these things apparently give me a stomach ache

I think it's strange that we celebrate the late Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, under whose council the United States moved towards civil rights, with a fairgrounds in Santa Barbara. I like civil rights and all, but I doubt many people were thinking about Earl Warren the man when they were at Earl Warren the showgrounds, stuffing their face those wonderful carnival foods-on-a-stick: corn dog, candy apple cotton candy, roasted corn on the cob.

In any case, I saw the Violent Femmes. They did a great job — way better than I would have expected from guys who have been performing for the past twenty years. They played a nearly two-hour set. Highlights: the xylophone solo in "Gone Daddy Gone" and the conch solo — yes, conch solo — in a song I had never heard before. Also worth noting: the lead singer looks like George Costanza with hair. Lowlights: Kristen's roommates turning into a drunk girl hive mind and feeling gross after ingesting so much junk food.

The next morning, I woke up sober and non-hungover and met the Nexus art crew for a day trip to Melrose to see the i am 8-bit show. Good stuff. Turns out a lot of people think about video games as much as I do. Wish I had pictures of the actual artwork, but I'll post what I snapped later.

Not so good: Pink's, the high-end hot dog stand we ate at afterwards. In retrospect, I can't imagine how ordering something called the "pastrami burrito hot dog" could have ended well. Picture grease soup with two hot dogs, melted cheese and shredded pastrami poorly contained in a tortilla and you'll get an idea of why I had another stomach ache later. (Honestly, whoever thought putting hot dogs, pastrami and burrito into the same entity is a madman, Frankenstein-style.)

Then, defying all logic, I returned to the fair. Megan gave me my first funnel cake experience — stomach ache, later — and wondered how Tiny the not-so-tiny ticket vendor might have ended up as a carnie. (My guess: "I was sniffing nail polish remover with my friends and when I woke up, I was here.") And then getting a shrimp platter at Carrows, which turns out to be fairly deadening while sober. Also, I went to bed with a stomach ache. Bleh.